Chile

First impressions of Santiago.

It was in the late evening when I got here, and near midnight when I got to the hostel.  Warm and humid.  The traffic was light and the streets were smooth, with very few speed bumps to slow the taxi down.

Public transit is very nice, but as it was late, and the subway closes down at mid night-ish I took the taxi.

The prices were a bit higher than what I expected, but only a little.  I do not know why I was not expecting there to be any sushi places here, but I have walked past three, one of them was a vegetarian sushi joint. (The area was one with a lot of veggie/vegan places, so fair enough.)

The park that parallels the Mapocho River is very nice.  Well kept and popular.  Miles long, but broken up by a lot of palces for cars to cross.  The river is not very big, and while there is a lot of traffic that runs along the park, the noise never seems to intrude too much into the park.

The park had more than a few statues and a small kidz play area along with this great fountain,

It also featured the National Art Gallery.  I am sure you can track down images from the Gallery online, but a thing that stood out to me was the amount of statuary that was there, a much higher ratio of statues to paintings than in most other art galleries I have gone to.

I really liked this one, and I have mixed feelings about how the pieces are displayed in that they were not roped or partitioned off.  It allowed you to get up close and personal with the pieces, and you can see how people have touched the right arm of the statue.  At times I feel this is a negative thing, a slight damage to the piece with every caress.  On the other hand those interactions also bring the observer closer to the artist and their work.

The gallery is not a massive building, but it does present itself quite well, and is obviously a place of quiet national pride, a place where the whole nation can look in and say, we Chileans, we have done this.